GOP not ready to quit
House Republicans are not quite ready to give up. They argue that they are still investigating and have scheduled a hearing with Hunter Biden's former business associates next week. They are also demanding recordings from the investigation of special counsel Robert Hur, who examined the president's handling of classified documents, even though that was not among the topics of the impeachment inquiry and Hur decided no criminal charges were warranted.
But in a recognition that an impeachment vote is unlikely at this point, Republicans have been exploring an alternative strategy of issuing criminal referrals urging the Justice Department to investigate Biden or people around him. Such a move would carry no legal weight and would essentially be little more than a symbolic statement, unless Trump wins and uses the referrals to justify a prosecution of Biden after he leaves office.
Unsurprisingly, Johnson did not take the advice from the White House. “It is not surprising that the White House would prefer to close the ongoing House inquiry which has uncovered that the Biden family and their associates received over $20 million from foreign sources, and that President Biden has lied repeatedly,” said Raj Shah, a spokesperson for the speaker. “The White House does not get to decide how impeachment gets resolved; that is for Congress to decide.”
While Republicans say that the Bidens and their circle made more than $20 million from foreign sources in China, Ukraine
In his letter Friday, Siskel needled the House GOP majority over its problems with impeachment. He quoted Republicans themselves as saying that they “can't identify a particular crime” supposedly committed by the president and lamenting that they had made impeachment “a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept.”
“The House majority ought to work with the president on our economy, national security and other important priorities on behalf of the American people, not continue to waste time on political stunts like this,” Siskel wrote.
Rather than finding proof that the president committed impeachable offenses, he added, “the investigation has continually turned up evidence that, in fact, the president did nothing wrong.” He listed 20 witnesses whose testimony, in his view, undercut the Republican theory that money paid to Hunter Biden by foreign firms amounted to bribery and noted that “the majority cannot identify any policy or governing decisions that were supposedly improperly influenced.”